Because people adore stable income with no risks, and because most programmers out there are hacks who will only ever learn one or two ancient languages that lost their competitive advantage 10 years ago.
Take a look at how insanely far you can go with Elixir + Phoenix on a server with 2 vCPUs and 2GB RAM. It's crazy. At least 80% of all web apps ever written will never get to the point where an upgrade would be needed.
So yeah, people love inertia and to parrot the same broken premise quotes like "But StackOverflow shows languages X and Y dominate the industry!".
Nah, it doesn't show that at all. It only shows that programmers are people like all others: going out of the comfortable zone is scary so our real industry is manufacturing bullshit post-hoc rationalizations to conceal the fact that we're scared of change. A mega-productive and efficient change at that.
Social reasons > objective technical reasons. Always has been true.
I completely agree. Most developers simply copy whatever is currently popular without taking into consideration their specific context and biz requirements. Almost all software solutions are massively complexed, with many points of failure, and high latencies for every single transaction, leading to a death spiral of even more complex and expensive “solutions” for “performance” reasons. Microservices is the poster child for this. In contrast, a single high-performance server can handle the full workload of 99.99% of web applications out there. With a separate warm stand-by server ready to take over if needed, and a linear event transaction log as the source of truth.
Because (despite the hype) Erlang embeds principles that can be implemented in other languages and they solve only a narrow set of problems in distributed systems. This does not justify a dedicated programming language.
Is Erlang particularly hyped? I don't usually see it suggested as a solution, I see it almost exclusively in reference to something already written in it, a fait accompli, like WhatsApp.
Because people adore stable income with no risks, and because most programmers out there are hacks who will only ever learn one or two ancient languages that lost their competitive advantage 10 years ago.
Take a look at how insanely far you can go with Elixir + Phoenix on a server with 2 vCPUs and 2GB RAM. It's crazy. At least 80% of all web apps ever written will never get to the point where an upgrade would be needed.
So yeah, people love inertia and to parrot the same broken premise quotes like "But StackOverflow shows languages X and Y dominate the industry!".
Nah, it doesn't show that at all. It only shows that programmers are people like all others: going out of the comfortable zone is scary so our real industry is manufacturing bullshit post-hoc rationalizations to conceal the fact that we're scared of change. A mega-productive and efficient change at that.
Social reasons > objective technical reasons. Always has been true.
/rant